For the second straight year, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has taken center stage in what is usually a routine appointment for a student leadership post on the UC Board of Regents.

Leaked emails revealing financial ties between a UCLA student nominee and the head of a pro-Israel group prompted the student leaders who submitted Avi Oved's name to ask the Regents to delay his confirmation.

Among their concerns is "the potential for outside organizations buying off student elected officials," said Kareem Aref, the outgoing president of the UC Student Association.

In the 2013 emails leaked to in the UC Berkeley Daily Californian, Oved -- then running for a UCLA campus office -- thanks Adam Milstein for his "generous donation" and pledges to "make sure UCLA will maintain its allegiance to Israel and the Jewish community." The Adam and Gila Milstein Family Foundation supports numerous organizations to promote understanding of Israel.

In another email, Milstein tells supporters: "It's of extreme importance that they prevail vs. some anti-Israel, pro- (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) students that are competing against them."

Debate over Israel sanctions and divestment has raged at U.S. colleges in recent years, with 19 Israel-related divestment resolutions in the past academic year alone and 10 the year before, according to cases tracked by the pro-Israel StandWithUs organization.

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The UC student-regent position has more to do with tuition policy than international relations, but last year, pro-Israel activists disputed the confirmation of Sadia Saifuddin, who had led a campaign at UC Berkeley to divest from companies with ties to the Israeli military or Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

Both Saifuddin -- who was confirmed -- and Oved have said they were unfairly targeted and that their work on the board will focus on UC student issues, not the Middle East.

"I do think we both were attacked based on our political stances that weren't really relevant to the position," Oved said in an interview Monday.

UCLA candidates are not required to disclose their campaign donors, Oved said, and it's not fair to hold him to a different standard.

The regents' confirmation hearing will continue Wednesday as scheduled, a decision that prompted an outraged opinion piece in the Daily Californian this week. The article by three writers characterized Milstein's public statements about Muslims as "noxious and vitriolic" and wrote that Oved's connection with him "sends a clear message that bigotry against our communities is perfectly acceptable in our university system."

Oved said his campus political party, Bruins United, received campaign funding last year through UCLA's Hillel, an organization for Jewish campus life. Some of that funding came from Milstein, he said, but it wasn't given directly to him.

Bruins United takes sponsorships from outside organizations, including Hillel, and encourages candidates to seek outside donations its co-chairwomen wrote in an email.

In a statement, Milstein wrote that he and his foundation have never given money "to Bruins United or any individual student's campaigns."

But in the leaked fundraising email, he identifies the candidates by name and asks supporters to make donations to the Hillel Center "earmarked for student government leaders."

Milstein declined to be interviewed. He did not directly answer questions about whether he wrote the emails, saying the question should be how and why they were leaked. He did not deny their authenticity.

The allegations, he wrote, "represent yet another step in an anti-Semitic, smear campaign that seeks to marginalize Jewish and Pro-Israel students."

But Aref, the head of the UC student group, said the concern was Oved's connection to outside groups -- not his position on Israel, which was well known when the group selected him as one of three finalists, he said.

"I think everybody on the board acknowledges that anybody coming into these positions is going to have their own political stances," Aref said. "But you elect them because you want them to represent you."